Thomas Reid Quotes on Mind (4 Quotes)

The vulgar allow that this expression implies a mind that thinks, an act of that mind which we call thinking, and an object about which we think. But, besides these three, the philosopher conceives that there is a fourth-to wit, the idea, which is the immediate object.

This is the philosophical meaning of the word idea and we may observe that this meaning of that word is built upon a philosophical opinion for, if philosophers had not believed that there are such immediate objects of all our thoughts in the mind, they would never have used the word idea to express them.

If we could obtain a distinct and full history of all that hath passed in the mind of a child from the beginning of life and sensation till it grows up to the use of reason, how its infant faculties began to work, and how they brought forth and ripened all the various notions, opin-ions, and sentiments, which we find in ourselves when we come to be capable of reflection, this would be a trea-sure of natural history which would probably give more light into the human faculties, than all the systems of philosophers about them from the beginning of the world.

The idea is in the mind itself, and can have no existence but in a mind that thinks but the remote or mediate object may be something external, as the sun or moon it may be something past or future it may be something which never existed.